* Well, you aren’t – as one former Labour special adviser puts it: ‘You get 5% of the gossip and you think, “I’m in, this is it,” then you get 20% of the gossip and you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m really in it now,” then once you get all of it, you realise that most of it is completely irrelevant,’ – but that does not stop it from being an enjoyable experience.
* In that same conversation, Adam passed on a piece of information to the author that he was certain was true but turned out to be massively exaggerated. That is all.
* This was, as you might have guessed, written before she left the Conservatives for Change UK – The Independent Group**. The analysis still works, though, and given the current political climate, any attempt to find an example that stands the test of time seems doomed anyway.
** Which she left between the first and second edit of this book. By the time this is published, we can only assume she will be an independent MP, somehow Prime Minister or running to be the mayor of Toronto.
* This is also out-of-date. Honestly, these people!
* She really does have a point: while interviewing people for this book, the author – a young woman herself – found out that it was apparently common knowledge that she had had an affair with a former MP, which was very much news to her.
PART 2
PLACES
‘I think it’s quite important to be able to distinguish between the chamber persona and people’s real personas, though some people are as awful in the chamber as out of it.’
– Paul Masterton MP
THE LABYRINTH
A famous line about Sex and the City is that it did not have four main characters but five – Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha might have been the focus of the show, but the city of New York was equally important. Westminster is similar: there is no point in talking about what people do there if we do not take into account the influence played by the architecture of the place. Winston Churchill knew this: during a debate about the reconstruction of the chamber after it was bombed by the Luftwaffe, he reminded his fellow parliamentarians that ‘we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us’.
This was remarked by Rhodri Walters and Robert Rogers too, in their book How Parliament Works: ‘From the start, the club-like rooms and common spaces of [Charles] Barry’s palace have encouraged members of both Houses to congregate and meet informally,’ they write. ‘Power Behind the Scenes’, an academic paper published in 2018, makes a similar point: ‘The use of space for members meeting informally is an intrinsic part of parliamentary life, important to members for learning the rules and practices of the institution, for sharing information with colleagues, especially party colleagues, for gaining support for one’s causes and for one’s own political advancement.’
What this means in practice is that Parliament feels like Hogwarts, both in its intimidating grandeur and large number of social spaces. There are of course the many bars and tea rooms, but socialisation is even deeply ingrained into the way politics works.
Take voting, for example: when the division bell rings, MPs have to rush to the voting lobbies, either from the chamber or elsewhere on the estate. They walk in with the Ayes or the Noes and are counted by tellers, then the doors lock behind them; the whole process lasts around 15 minutes.
There are many ways in which lawmakers can vote, and this really is not the quickest one, or even the most straightforward. Still, efforts to reform it never really get anywhere, because of how the lobbies are really used (hint: the clue is in the name).
‘There’s a lot of colleagues who will linger in the division lobbies, sit and wait for their favourite people to come by,’ explains Chris Leslie MP. ‘You can’t really explain it to people who have not been in there, but there are little gaggles within the division lobbies who will sit down and chat, and this place is pretty deliberately set up for it.’
On top of being a good way to bump into colleagues and have a chat, division lobbies can be used to talk to those with more power than you; no matter your status in the House of Commons, you must go into the room with everyone else when the bell rings.
‘As a backbencher, I used to love the fact that you’d vote in person going through the voting lobby because it was your opportunity to find out what’s going on, talk to other people, most importantly to lobby a minister about something,’ says Amber Rudd MP. However, this changed when she started climbing up the ladder, eventually reaching one of the four great offices of state.
‘As a minister, you can hardly get through a lobby. There are people, particularly as Home Secretary, coming up and asking you about a problem with their particular immigration issue from one of their constituents. But that sort of access I think is fundamental to checks and balances for our constitution. And the verbal exchange is an effective way of delivering it.’*
The division lobbies are also important because only MPs can be in them, so they can chat safely in the knowledge that a pesky journalist won’t be casually listening in on their conversations. Another sanctuary for MPs is, of course, the chamber of the House of Commons. Though it would be ill-advised (and discourteous) to launch into endless group discussions while someone is addressing the room, keeping an eye on who sits where can be useful.
The dynamics of it aren’t exactly opaque: much like in a classroom, those who sit closer to the front bench tend to be the eager teacher’s pets, while those at the very back are the mischief-makers. So far so obvious, but given that chamber proceedings are televised, it is nice to be able to spot someone going from the second row to the back as a visual manifestation of them becoming less keen on their leadership. This is especially true of recently sacked or willingly departed ministers: where will they go once they have to leave the front row? If they end up at the very back with the rebels, it can tell you a lot about how they plan to act now they are no longer subject to the stringent rules of the front bench.
The other places MP have to themselves are the Smoking Room (sadly non-smoking) and the tea room (which does provide tea). These two are, in many ways, where power truly is gained and lost, and where legislation gains traction or starts heading for oblivion.
According to one MP quoted by Lord Norton, academic and constitutional issues expert, the tea room is ‘the archetypal venue for the hatching of plots; the starting post for those famous “murmurings of backbench discontent”. MPs feel safe here. Away from staff, journos and members of the public, they can gripe away happily to their heart’s content, in the sure knowledge that they can be as indiscreet as they like.’
Regardless of your current status or positioning, these are spaces you need to occupy as an MP. If you’re a party leader or prime minister, you need to be seen there. As former MP Jerry Hayes puts it – ‘The first advice I gave to David Cameron when he became prime minister was basically, you’ve got to go round the tea rooms, you’ve got to go round the bars. You’ve got to, once a week, go into the members’ dining room and sit down and talk to these ghastly people, listen to their mad views. Because everyone wants to say to their friends, and anyone who’ll bloody listen, “Oh, the Prime Minister was only saying to me the other day …”’
If you’re a cabinet minister, you might lead your department towards an iceberg by not realising that the policies you’re pursuing aren’t popular with your party. A junior minister? Make sure you’re around and have chats with your colleagues, as popularity is a good thing to have during a reshuffle, and you will be appreciated if you can provide a link between the parliamentary party and your boss.
If you have ministerial ambitions, it is good to create a base for yourself and get a good sense of what your fellow MPs like, dislike and generally bitch about. A backbencher with no interest in the greasy pole should still take the time to chatter away, as they will eventually have a policy they deeply care about and will need all the support they can get, especially from people who know that helping them won’t even be useful to their careers. Long-term rebels should also haun
t these quarters if they want to identify other malcontents and convince waverers to join the resistance.
Another interesting feature of these rooms is how they are laid out, and what it tells us about different Houses. In the members’ tea room, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour MPs all have different areas they sit in. Naturally, the seats aren’t marked in any way, and as members go there for the first time, they must either magically guess where to sit, be told, or find out the hard way. This will naturally reinforce the tribalism of the Commons – if most of your socialising is done along party lines, it will be harder for you to develop good personal relationships with members from the other sides, rightly or wrongly. It also compartmentalises information, and can ensure that, say, a piece of gossip or a rumour widely shared within Labour circles takes a long time to reach the Conservative benches, and vice versa.
The House of Lords is different. In their dining room, where most of the mingling is done, the rules are more lax and the ‘long table’ is what matters. ‘You walk in there and you sit down next to the last person who sat down, so you have no choice about where you sit,’ explains one baroness. ‘You have a choice in that you can sit on the left or the right, but apart from that you’re going to the next free seat. If you choose the long table you could be sitting next to a cross-bencher, Lib Dem, Conservative, you don’t know. So at that point people are always interesting – they will often just plant themselves down next to you and start chatting.’
According to fellow peer Lord Norton, ‘That can make a difference to what you pick up on and then what builds support in the chamber,’ which is noticeable: the House of Lords is a place where consensus-building tends to be the way to go and where partisanship is softer.
THE ANTHILL
There is one place in the Palace of Westminster where everyone is free to mingle and chat with everyone else, but it wasn’t meant to be used that way. Portcullis House was commissioned in 1992 then opened in 2001, and was built to provide the estate with more office space for MPs and rooms for select committees. The building’s atrium was to be used as a meeting place for MPs’ staff but overall, PCH was simply seen as an answer to space constraints, and nothing more – then it opened.
With its glass roof, large open space, dozens of tables and multiple cafés and canteens, it quickly became the beating heart of Parliament and changed the working (and socialising) habits of most inhabitants of the bubble.
‘It was never meant to become the centre of everyone’s life; the centre was supposed to be central lobby, but it’s shifted the entire centre of the Palace,’ says Philip Cowley, a political scientist and academic. ‘When I first used to come to Westminster in the late eighties, early nineties, you walked into central lobby, you could sit on one of those green benches in the central bit and everybody would go by. We’d be able to play that game of “Oh, I thought he was dead!” and you’d see the Prime Minister and you’d see the ministers.
‘You only had to be there for half an hour and you’d have got your fame ticked off for the day. It’s like fucking tumbleweed in there now sometimes, although there are tourists going in and out. Instead, everything’s shifted over to this modern, very open place, almost designed for people to mingle and chat and gossip. I can wander around there and bump into people and chat to people in a way that was harder before.’
In the olden days of the 20th century, there were few places where one could simply sit down and wait for life to come to them, especially if they weren’t an MP, and they didn’t fancy an alcoholic drink. The tea rooms tend to feature a number of tables to which it might be hard to invite oneself without a specific reason; lobbies aren’t really made for long-term lingering and corridors are just that: stand in one for too long and you will look a little odd.
Portcullis is open to everyone and has its own guest entrance, making it the ideal place for just about every type of meeting, free from the constraints of space-based hierarchy. Contrary to the rest of the estate, it also looks modern and airy, and close to the atmosphere of a normal workplace cafeteria.
‘Anyone can be there, so you get interaction between members, between peers and MPs. You’ve got staff, you’ve got the journalists of course who hang around, and then others coming in,’ explains Lord Norton. ‘So it’s just fascinating watching journalists interacting or just sitting there. You’ve got everybody in Portcullis, so it is now the social space of Westminster, because there’s nothing equivalent to it. It’s one of those things that once it’s there you think, how did we manage before?’
There is, however, an issue with everyone now meeting in the same place, and it is that everyone can see who is meeting everyone else. If, for example, you see a Daily Mirror hack having a coffee with a Labour rebel MP at 1:00pm, you may raise your eyebrow if the next day’s Daily Mirror features a brutal attack on the Labour leader by an anonymous MP. If this happens you might even, unprompted or if someone asks, mention in passing that you’d seen the reporter and MP having a chat the day before, which of course could mean nothing, or mean everything. That person might then be asked about it by someone else and repeat what they were told and before long, that MP being the source of that story will have become received wisdom, rightly or not.
This happens all the time and is hard to then deny. The Financial Times’ Jim Pickard gives one example of it: ‘A few months ago, I got up from talking to [Labour comms chief] Seumas Milne, and then three minutes later, I tweeted something about a Labour person criticising a centrist Labour MP. It was an entirely different person, but almost immediately someone on Twitter said, “He was sitting talking to Seumas Milne in PCH!” I mean the source of my tweet definitely was not him. It was 100% not him.’
Still, what do you do then? The only solution would have been for him to tweet back ‘It wasn’t Seumas Milne, it was [name],’ which would mean betraying his source, thus breaking what may be the single most important rule of journalism. In these cases, the only option is to blithely deny it, hope it doesn’t catch on and move on.
In any case, PCH remains a form of heaven for the hacks: most of their job involves talking to people, and most of the people they could possibly want to talk to will now appear in the same place at one point or another during the day. In order to be as efficient as possible, they all develop different techniques. The more senior ones can afford to sit somewhere and wait for people to come and talk to them – the bit by the escalator on the west side of the atrium is a particularly sought-after spot – while others may wander around, circling like sharks and waiting for a poor innocent fish to swim by alone.
MPs aren’t always happy about it. In the words of Paul Masterton, ‘It’s like something out of a safari. You just have journalists swarming around and you know you’ll be sitting down during your lunch, trying to have ten minutes on your own eating, and then you’ll just look up and a journalist will be helping themselves to the seat next to you saying, “So how are you, Paul?” I’m eating my jerk chicken, leave me alone!’
Still, the MP/journalist relationship doesn’t only go one way, and though they might not always admit it, politicians enjoy knowing that they can casually bump into reporters if they need to. They might also take advantage of the fact that everyone can spy on everyone else. The day after he left the Cabinet over Brexit disagreements, David Davis strolled into PCH and happily plumped himself down for a solo lunch, grinning contentedly at passers-by. His bet was probably that hard Brexiteers would stop by to congratulate him on his move, and it is exactly what happened: in the space of roughly 30 minutes, he had about a dozen pleasant-looking chats with passing MPs, making him look both relaxed about his decision and popular with his own benches.
It wasn’t reported as such, it hardly was breaking news, but anyone who witnessed the scene would have made a mental note of it. Leaving government rarely is a happy occasion, but this showed that he at least seemed to have made the right call. Another classic trick is the public display of reconciliation: if two MPs were
either spotted having a massive row or rumoured to have had one, they could do worse than have a very public coffee or lunch in Portcullis House to show everyone just how well they actually get along – nothing to see here!
In a similar vein, rumours can be purposely started with public displays of plotting. ‘I saw [Labour pro-Remain MP] Chuka Umunna and [Conservative pro-Remain MP] Anna Soubry having a coffee together in Portcullis House a few months ago,’ one peer said. ‘Now they must have done that on purpose, because they knew they were going to be seen by everyone else, rather than it being private, they’re not stupid.’*
Let’s run with that general example. If, say, you wanted to organise a proper cross-party rebellion against Brexit that would need to take people by surprise to work, you would meet in someone’s office or away from Westminster. If, on the other hand, you wanted people to think that you’re organising a dangerous-looking rebellion against Brexit, having a conspiratorial meeting of Remain-supporting Conservative and Labour MPs in PCH would be a good idea.
The substance of the conversation doesn’t necessarily matter: what is important is that people will start talking about a Remainer plot, from the journalists to their parliamentary colleagues. What happens next is that some of your colleagues might approach you to say that they want in, which can give you a better idea of what numbers you might get if you really were to prepare a rebellion. Another is that the powers-that-be, either in government or opposition, might start caring about you. It is hard to make yourself heard if you’re only a small group meeting in private, but the last thing party leaders and their whips want is something that might undermine their authority, and open plotting can definitely do that.
Haven't You Heard Page 4